We are in the middle of a storage upgrade project. Upgrading from an EMC NS-480 to an EMC VNX 5500.72TB usable space. A mix of SSD/EFD, SAS and NL-SAS. Using EMC's FAST Suite which comprises of FAST Cache and FAST VP (auto-tiering). Also bought additional EFD's for additional Cache.

Replicating right now to our DR site which has a VNX 5300 (42TB). Using VMWare SRM for DR.

We replicate through rsync and a few scripts 500+ GB of stored data to webservers at different data centers as well as to our office for backup purposes.

Used to use unison but it had some issue I couldn't resolve. Distributed file system would be a better idea but as the servers are mostly geographically diverse locations it would need to cache well, be read/write on all nodes track file deletion requests (so it doesn't resend the same data etc) in the end while its a bit of a kludge in our scenario rsync works reliably :)

I havent really looked into SAN level replication very much but on first thoughts I dont really like the idea of replicating any corruption to another SAN. My thoughts are that it would be better to do application level replication and let the application take care of any corruption. For example we run our Exchange servers in a DAG over 2 separate sites. I can create lagged copied of the database so that any corruption doesnt copy straight to inactive database and then can use that if necessary. Similar thing with SQL log shipping

Do those that use SAN level replication like it / dislike it or have any thoughts otherwise?

Hey Mauricio - thanks for the shoutout! Exciting times for us in HP Storage and we'll have tons of very interesting announcements at HP Discover. You can keep up with everything at HP Discover on this hp.com page (http://bit.ly/SzrCsv) or sign up to attend the announcement webcast (http://bit.ly/YaSxPg). Sorry - had to use bit.ly as I couldn't get the embed URL to work and these URL's are long and ugly.

We actually use dedupe folders on the XIV SAN, but even with deduping the backup still doesn't always complete. When your backup includes large folders with literally millions of 200KB files, not much else can be done.

Our backup guy really wants us to just get a SAN unit (or just more LUNs) just for backuping up and do backups to disk with less frequent tape backups, but noone's willing to stump up the cash.

That, and BackupExec has some recurring problems with dedupe folders. We're also trying to pitch NetBackup as a possible solution.

freitasm: Anyone currently in a storage project with strange/huge/big data requirements?

I'm not directly involved but I do have some insight into what goes on in our organisation - you wouldn't believe the storage requirement for the combined records both business and medical of four district health boards.

In our consulting and development company we're all running on 64bit HP ProBook's (Win 7 or 8) except a couple of guys who have stuck to their old machines (Dell and Asus). We also run an HP Proliant server, running several large databases, code repositories and staff documents. The server is backed up daily to USB drives which are swapped out and taken offsite by staff for DR purposes.

We'd like to go to cloud but our main issue (the our clients main issue) is security. When I say security I don't mean from hackers, I mean from an ownership/IP protection point of view. Our large customers (the biggest companies in NZ) have no concerns about the security of their data in the cloud from hackers, or about cloud server up time. The issue is what country is the data sitting in and can that country's government force its right to take/view/delete said data? We have the same problem. Though we're a small company our IP is everything we are. If that data is on a cloud server and a foreign government or organisation could take it, overnight we'd become nothing. Therefore everything we do needs to stay in NZ.

The problem therefore is can we find a decent NZ cloud host, guaranteeing NZ storage for a price that benefits our business. Until then, we'll just keep our server backed up and wait.

As for the backup of our personal machines, it came up in our last staff meeting. I believe we're all going to be getting external drives and asked to do periodic backups to be able to do a full restore without losing days of business time.

The issue is what country is the data sitting in and can that country's government force its right to take/view/delete said data?ur personal machines, it came up in our last staff meeting. I believe we're all going to be getting external drives and asked to do periodic backups to be able to do a full restore without losing days of business time.

Very topical concern considering the mega-upload debacle where plenty of legitimate data has been confiscated!